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Dinner with destiny

13 January 2001

By Philip Cohen

IT’S THE ultimate problem in family etiquette. The researchers from your
local lab phone to say they’ve thawed out a 50,000-year-old ancestor of yours,
and they want to bring him over. The question is, should you welcome this
forebear into your home?

Perhaps, like palaeobiologist Simon Conway Morris of Cambridge University,
you believe that we differ very little from people who lived tens of millennia
before us. He suggests that, given suitable education, your long-lost kin would
have no problem holding their own in your business or at your local bistro.
“They could walk into the room and, given a haircut, they’d fit right in,” says
Conway Morris. In other words, our evolution has been all but over for quite
some time.

There is a certain comfort in that thought. After all, if you decide to go
for cryogenic preservation when you die, it could be you who’s cast in the role
of the defrosted dinner guest. But before you make those hotel reservations for
a family reunion in 50,000 years’ time, you should be warned that there are
those who strongly disagree with Conway Morris’s forecast for our species. Far
from slowing evolution down, they say, technology and culture could be
accelerating it to a furious pace. So instead of being welcomed as an equal, you
could be shunned as a primitive freak.

Despite their varying visions of our future, scientists on all sides of the
debate over our evolutionary destiny agree about how things started out. In the
beginning, all life on Earth was at the mercy of the same evolutionary forces of …